Tyler Clementi jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge in October 2010. He was a promising musician and a good student, just starting his freshman year at Rutgers. Some chain of heartbreak led him to his final act, and the last link in that chain was a stupid prank pulled by his roommate, Dharun Ravi.

Ravi left his computer webcam on when Clementi had a guest in the room, then watched from another room, tweeting and snickering to his friends that Clementi was “kissing a dude.”

Clementi found out he’d been spied on and humiliated. He told school officials he wanted to be assigned a new roommate. Three days after the incident, he jumped to his death.

More than 35,000 people a year kill themselves in the U.S. Each of them made a fatal decision based on some combination of internal demons and external forces. Most of those deaths are not followed by jury trials, with good reason. The criminal code is an awfully blunt instrument for allocating responsibility in a suicide.

But Tyler Clementi’s death was one in a series of suicides in the headlines that season, most linked to bullying, many of them teens who were gay or accused of being gay. People wanted action. People wanted to send messages.

Last week, a New Jersey jury did, convicting Ravi of 15 counts of bias intimidation, invading Clementi’s privacy and hate crimes. He could be sentenced to as much as 10 years in prison, or deported to India, where he’s never lived.

“It’s a just verdict that will send a message about the seriousness of bias-motivated crimes,” one commenter told The New York Times.

“It’s a watershed moment, because it says youth is not immunity,” one ex-prosecutor said.

I’m not so sure. We ought to expect children to do childish things, adolescents to act like teenage jerks. Sentencing children to adult punishments for immature acts seems to me unjust.

Yes, teenage jerks should pay a price for doing jerky things, but if Tyler hadn’t killed himself and made national headlines, if the offense didn’t have a gay culture-wars angle to it, wouldn’t Ravi’s jerky act have been punished more proportionately?

As it happens, within a week of the verdict, a Boston College football player was caught making and distributing audio recordings of a teammate having sex with his girlfriend. He’s been suspended, but not arrested.

Thankfully, that case didn’t end in suicide. But is the BC student’s act that different from Ravi’s? Shouldn’t Ravi be punished for what he did, not for what Clementi did three days later?

The Rutgers incident was worse than the one at BC because it involved gay sex, prosecutors would argue, making it a hate crime.

I’ve never liked the term “hate crime.” Hate is a feeling, not an act, and I don’t like criminalizing feelings, or expecting juries to read the minds of defendants.

After the trial, Ravi said that was the part that kept him from pleading guilty to a lesser offense.

“If I took the plea, I would have had to testify that I did what I did to intimidate Tyler and that would be a lie,” he told the Star Ledger. “I didn’t act out of hate and I wasn’t uncomfortable with Tyler being gay.”

I know all the arguments for hate crime designations — that motivation can be an aggravating factor in lots of crimes, not just bias-related ones. I understand that painting a swastika on a synagogue can be more hurtful than a simple graffiti. And, of course, everyone wants to “send a message” that bias against protected groups is unacceptable.

But there’s another problem with hate crime laws, at least in this case. If the narrative is that Clementi is dead because Dharun Ravi hated him for his sexual identity, something disappears from the story: Tyler Clementi. He’s no longer an actor, even in his own suicide. Every thing was done to him, nothing was done by him. He’s assumed to be a victim of someone else, and why? Because he is a member of a victim class.

There’s something demeaning in being given special protection by the law. The “message” it sends is that if you’re going to give someone a hard time, make sure he isn’t gay. It implies that gay people can’t stand up for themselves.

Gay people need and deserve a lot of things — like respect, marriage equality, and protection from employment discrimination — but I’m not sure they need that.

Dan Savage, the sex and relationships advice columnist, was saddened by the verdict. Ravi’s act may have been the last straw for Clementi, Savage said, but it wasn’t the only one.

Other individuals and institutions had already failed Clementi, Savage said: A church that denounced him, parents who pressured him, schoolmates who bullied him, a culture that didn’t recognize him — this is speculation here, but justifiable, I think. The suicide rate for gay teens is huge, and they weren’t all webcammed by their roommates.

In this case, Ravi is a classic scapegoat, sacrificed to take everyone else off the hook for Tyler Clementi’s sad end.

Shortly before Clementi’s death, Savage and his husband launched the It Gets Better Project, through which grownups reach out through YouTube to tell young LGBT people who are bullied or confused to hold on, because life gets better when you escape from high school

Since then, thousands of people — gay and straight, young and old, famous and not — have told their stories on the It Gets Better YouTube channel. Millions of adolescent viewers have seen them, likely pulling at least some of them back from the brink of suicide.

That’s how you send a message.

Rick Holmes, opinion editor for the Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. He can be reached at rholmes@wickedlocal.com.

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